Q&A Marine Traffic

What is the battery usage at sea for cellular (NB-IoT) trackers?

While at sea there is no network communication. One of the worries is that the trackers will spend an excessive amount of time looking for networks and this could drain the battery.

There are a couple of angles to this:

• Yes, a failed network search is costly.
• However we have modeled the big land regions where are active. Outside those regions there will be no network connection attempts. This assumes a valid GPS fix of course.
• A network search is done whenever the trackers wants to send something
• In idle state that is typically twice a day (once for the keep alive message, once for the daily location capture if enabled)
• Is the tracker in idle state:
  • In the large majority of the cases a vessel has such a huge mass that the tracker is not detecting motion at all, as such no location captures is done and no message send attempt as done.
  • The exception case is where the asset is close to running machinery. In that case with a frequent on the move interval the situation is indeed far from ideal and the battery will drain much faster than on land.

Could this approach be used in non-vessel cases too?

Absolutely, actually this solution was inspired by the BLE tag tracking solution. There a similar approach is used where parent trackers which are equipped with a wired BLE scanner take simple BLE tags along.